The Best Ways to Create a Website

After purchasing a domain name for your website and choosing a website hosting company to host the site, you can begin the actual creation of your site. Some people decide to pay hundreds of dollars to a web design company to create their website for them. However, that is money you can save by taking the time to create your own.

Create Your Content

Because creating content for your website is one of the biggest tasks you have to do, it is a good idea to get it done first. The content will consist of the text you want to appear on each page of your site and the titles for those pages. Some basic pages that are commonly placed on websites are "About Us," "Contact Us," and "Products" or "Services." Your website visitors should be able to read your content and walk away knowing who you are, what you do and how to contact you.

Select a Color Scheme

After creating your content, choose a color scheme. There are two basic colors you need for your website, text color and background color. If you are not good at picking colors that complement each other, try using a color wheel, such as the one listed in the "Resources" section at the end of this article. Once you have decided on the colors you want, use an HTML color chart to get the proper HTML codes to yield your colors.

Choose Your Graphics

When choosing graphics for your website, be sure you have permission to use the graphics. If the graphics are your own pictures, then you don't have to worry about usage rights. However, if you select graphics from online websites such as Stockphoto.com you will need usage rights, which will sometimes cost you a fee. Failing to obtain usage rights for a graphic image can result in copyright infringement, which can get you into a lot of legal trouble.

Make Your Pages

Log into the control panel of your website to begin inserting your content, colors, and graphics. Some control panels will utilize easy website builders that do not require any coding knowledge. These easy site builders are called WYSIWIG editors (What You See Is What You Get). After creating web pages for all your content, save the pages. Publish the website when you have finished creating the entire site. After publishing the site, it will be "live" on the World Wide Web for everyone to see.